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25 May 2018 5:47:20am

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I'm a 42 yr old mum of 2 young children. My mother was a conciencsous objector to vaccines ...none of 8 in my family were vaccinated.

When it came to my own children I knew I was biased against vaccination. My husband was also biased ...for vaccination. I knew this would create a problem so I wanted to research and make a new decision separate from emotive upbringing.

I was open to changing sides ...but I needed useful information to make that leap. I hoped that the 'for' literature would be helpful in educating me. But I was disappointed to find that it also lacked detail and was similarly emotive and bombarding ...it didn't address the concerns raised by the 'against' side ...instead bombarding with confusingly laid out graphs of numbers and fine print detailing small numbers of failures that encouraged readers to gloss over. It finished off with the old demand that everyone just has to vaccinate for vaccination to be effective. But seeing those 'failure' numbers just tapped into my bias and encouraged me to worry - I wasn't ready to risk my child being a failure number.So despite at the outset, having been ready to challenge my bias, I now felt at sea ...the result of our efforts to make a rational decision together lead instead to me staying in my camp and my husband in his ...our compromise ...I would accept them being vaccinated when their immune systems had developed a little ...so with my acceptance he took them for vaccinations just inside their first year.A few years later, my sister (having settled in London from Australia) went through the same process of questioning her bias ...and she encountered the same frustration with lack of helpful information ...both sides of the argument staunch, yet mostly emotive - not addressing the other side's concerns ...reluctantly she also opted to vaccinate - because her chosen home city gets exposed to a cocktail of viruses from across the planet.So I'm tapping into the comments of 'Concerned' (in this conversation) and also comments within the Life Matters story ...I'm suggesting from my own experience that these open conversations NEED to be had a lot more ...that the fears and questions of both sides need to be heard and addressed properly. I suspect that its the LACK of useful conversation that MIGHT MAKE people steer AWAY from vaccination rather, than as Natasha suggested - that talking about the problems makes people scared to vaccinate. I agree instead with Sonya - that we need to be scared of both vaccination and no vaccination and use that fear to fuel transparency and learning. What scared me was when people told me I SHOULD vaccinate for the good of the herd and yet wouldn't or couldn't address the fact that my friend with mentally disabled daughter seemed fine till she got vaccinated.

Yet, this discussion has been the first I have encountered that has owned up to the failures of vaccination while also explaining to me wh

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